- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 18:03:26 -0500
- To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Cc: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>, "'Olivier Fehr'" <Olivier.Fehr@ofehr.com>, Bill de hOra <dehora@eircom.net>, www-tag@w3.org
> >A standard that provides an abstract model for the
> >interoperating **system** (eg, X3D) is sufficient to enable
> >two different implementors to create two different
> >implementations for which a third author can write
> >a document in any of the authorized encodings and expect
> >it to operate with either of those implementations to some
> >degree of rendering or behavioral fidelity.
>
> This perhaps is the crux of the matter. Efforts to standardize data
> models and semantics are effectively efforts to standardize behavior.
> And I don't want to behave. (Bad Rusty! No biscuit!)
You can also standardize semantics (with our without a concrete
syntax) without talking about behavior, as is done for knowledge
representation languages like RDF. Informally, the semantics allow
each party to make factual statements which others are free to act on
as they like. This allows a kind of shared knowledge to emerge --
which I think counts as "interoperation" -- without any comment about
behavior. (If we want to talk about which knowledge is really *true*
we may need to talk about the behavior of only stating true things,
but that's not part of the RDF specs.)
-- sandro
Received on Monday, 27 October 2003 18:01:32 UTC